


sorry i came to your party

by Rabbitt



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: Drug Addiction, F/M, Poetry, Tattoos
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-06
Updated: 2013-11-06
Packaged: 2017-12-31 15:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1033445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rabbitt/pseuds/Rabbitt
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A list of things Sherlock Holmes no longer misses: London, cocaine, Moriarty.</p>
            </blockquote>





	sorry i came to your party

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the title is from Richard Siken. Yes, it’s from “Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out.” I am sorry on both accounts for the cliche.
> 
> I haven’t actually seen enough Elementary to qualify for writing fic - apologies in advance if any of this is wrong.

_Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party._

_Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party_

_and seduced you_

_and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing._

_You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?_

_\- Richard Siken,_ “Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out”

 

* * *

 

A list of things Sherlock Holmes no longer misses: London, cocaine, Moriarty. 

(Only one of these, he tells himself, is a lie.)

 

* * *

 

Moriarty sends Sherlock letters. Sherlock does not write back.

 

* * *

 

After Moriarty - 

(he wants there to be an after, a polarity: yes, there was pain, but now it is over. There was a wound and now there is scar tissue. She hurt me, and I healed. I loved her, and I stopped. Not the kind of ache he would have to feel for years, bones twinging, every time it rained.)

( _Recovering_ , Watson tells him. No such thing as a recovered addict.)

\- after Moriarty, Sherlock wants a new tattoo. He wants to get honey bees inked in a line on the inside of his elbow - _apis mellifera mellifera_ , or, if he’s feeling particularly indelicate, _apis mellifera scutellata_ \- or a lion, all teeth, over his heart, or a sundew, bright and wet, curled squidlike right on top of his pulse point. He always laughs like an engine going faster and faster after he gets inked. Tattoos mean pain mean endorphins mean _high_. Needles, needles, needles.

Sherlock does actually understand the concept of displacement with regards to addiction, especially when he makes it _so obvious_ for himself.

He gets as far as walking into a shop. He looks at all the tigers and butterflies and five-point stars hung on the wall, thinks about all the stories people are trying to tell. Looks at the tattoo artist, bent over a man’s bare back, shirt in his hands, lines of muscle shaking beneath her. Sees: _ex-boyfriend, wife, daughter, service, obituary,_ the history on each of them. He doesn’t know what he’s immortalising: if he’s leaving himself a warning sign, _you can never love this much again or it will_ swallow _you_ , or if he’s just trying to remember it. Before. After. _This is Irene, and I loved her. This is Moriarty, and -_

 _It means I survived,_ he thinks, gritting his teeth. His hand claws around his elbow, right where he wanted the bees to be, squeezes tight like a tourniquet. _It means I lived through you._

It feels too much like a love letter.

He walks out the door, veins throbbing beneath his fingers.

  

* * *

 

_Dear Moriarty,_

Fuck you.

 

 _Dear M,_  

When you touched me, I think you ruined me.

 

_Dear Jamie,_

It terrifies me that if I ever got my hands on you, I do not know what I would do with them.

 

_Dear Irene,_

I would cut you out of me, if I could, but I fear you must be in my veins, a toxin, a virus, a bad blood transfusion. When I press my fingers to my wrists, my throat, sometimes in a pulse-throb I think I feel you pass by. I wonder if I split myself open, if pieces of you would spill out. I wonder how much I would have to slice to excise you completely. I wake up in the night and reach for you. I wake up in the night and retch. I can taste you, then, the saltwater of your skin between my teeth again, pressed between tongue and palate like a sacrament. My stomach has never hurt this much, like I have swallowed fire, live rats, splinters of glass, with the force of how much I miss you, how much I wish you were dead.

 

_Dearest,_

I got your letter yesterday. I had just come home from solving a murder when I saw your handwriting in the mailbox. A man was shot in Brooklyn and the door was locked from the inside. Perhaps you saw it on the news? I doubt it was a big enough story to make it halfway across the world, but I know how you like to keep an eye on New York. It was dreadfully simple to figure out. I kept thinking you would have done it much better.

A woman yesterday propositioned me. She had hair like cornsilk and carnelian oil paint underneath her fingernails and I wanted to ask her if she had ever painted _Judith Slaying Holofernes_ , if she liked to put paint on the canvas with her fingers, with a knife.

A point of clarification: in your letter, you wrote, _none of them ever understand, darling, when I slid the knives in and out of them they asked me why I was hurting them, they could never see I was trying to carve something beautiful out of them,  You always knew: when you offered your flesh to me, you wanted to know what I could make of it._ Did you mean that metaphorically?

It has been snowing in New York. You would like it - it is a very wet snow, everyone leaves footprint, hollows in the drifts on the sidewalk and wet prints tracked inside. It is very easy to hunt things. It makes me think of Westminster, November. Do you remember the day? We stayed under my sheets for hours, and you told me about cadmium, lithopone, king’s yellow - all the colours men have died from.

I wonder how long Newgate will keep you.

As to the man in Brooklyn - did you read the headlines and solve the case yourself? It should have been obvious. His hand was holding the gun.

Yesterday morning, the fog rolled in from the harbour and flooded the streets with white. It did not remind me of London at all.

Ever Yours,

 

_Sherlock Holmes_

 


End file.
